I reached in and picked it up, and I sat down right there on the floor with it in my lap, Cody cartoons still paused on the TV, because that old woman, Alvina Braun, ninety-two years old and alone and a little sad her whole life, had been keeping the one great love of it locked away in a window bench under three coats of paint.
It was a bundle of letters, tied with a faded ribbon, and a photograph, and a ring made out of a coin, the kind a man carves when he has no money for a real one. The photograph was Alvina, young and beautiful, standing beside a young man in a work shirt, the two of them squinting into the sun, in love, you could see it plain as day. And the letters were in German, in a careful hand, signed with a name that was not from around here.
I had them translated, by the old pastor at St. John, and here is the story he pieced together for me. During the war, they held German prisoners right here in Minnesota, thousands of them, and put them to work on the farms while our own boys were away overseas. And a lot of them were just scared young conscripts, farm boys themselves. One of them worked the fields near where Alvina grew up, a German-speaking girl in a German town, and the two of them fell in love, quiet and forbidden, across a fence and a war.
When the war ended, they shipped him back. Across an ocean, to a flattened country, and there was no getting him back, not then, not for a poor farm girl. He wrote her for a while, and then the letters stopped, the way they do, and she never knew if he lived or died. And Alvina Braun never married. She stayed in this house seventy years, went to church every single Sunday, kept to herself, always seemed a little bit sad, and nobody ever knew why, because she never once told a living soul about the young man she loved and lost to a war that was already over.
I will wait, he wrote, in the last letter she kept. Whatever happens, know that a girl in Minnesota was the best thing that ever came to me in a bad time, and I carried you home in my heart. Wait for me if you can. And if I cannot come, then live, and be happy, and do not spend your whole life waiting on a ghost.
She spent her whole life waiting on a ghost. And I sat on my floor, twenty-nine years old, freshly left by a husband who walked out on me and my boy, feeling sorry for myself in a fixer house I bought alone, and I held seventy years of a faithful, lonely, unbroken love in my two hands, and something in me straightened up.
I am going to find out what became of him. I have already started, with the historical society and the records they keep. Maybe he lived a good long life over there with somebody else. Maybe he waited too. Either way, Alvina Braun loved somebody all the way to the end, and I am going to make sure her story gets told, and I am going to quit feeling sorry for myself, and I am going to build my boy a good life in this house. That old woman left me a whole lot more than a window bench. She left me a spine.